The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche Read Free Book Online Page A

vengeful and godless; in short, he became “pre-Homeric.” . . .

NOTES (1873)
    Deification of success is truly commensurate with human meanness. Whoever has closely studied even a single success knows what factors (stupidity, wickedness, laziness, etc.) have always helped—and not as the weakest factors either. It is mad that success is supposed to be worth more than the beautiful possibility which was still there immediately before. But to find in history the realization of the good and the just, that is blasphemy against the good and the just. This beautiful world history is, in Heraclitean terms, “a chaotic pile of rubbish.” What is strong wins: that is the universal law. If only it were not so often precisely what is stupid and evil!
    (VI, 334 f .)

    Hegel says: “That at the bottom of history, and particularly of world history, there is a final aim, and that this has actually been realized in it and is being realized—the plan of Providence—that there is reason in history: that is to be shown philosophically and thus as altogether necessary.” And: “A history without such an aim and without such a point of view would be merely a feeble-minded pastime of the imagination, not even a children’s fairy tale, for even children demand some interest in stories, i.e., some aim one can at least feel, and the relation of the occurrences and actions to it.” Conclusion: Every story must have an aim, hence also the history of a people and the history of the world. That means: because there is “world history” there must also be some aim in the world process. That means: we demand stories only with aims. But we do not at all demand stories about the world process, for we consider it a swindle to talk about it. That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin; that I can posit an aim for myself is another matter. But a state has no aim; we alone give it this aim or that.
    (VI, 336)

    On the mythology of the historical. Hegel: “What happens to a people and occurs within it has its essential significance in its relation to the state; the mere particularities of the individuals are most remote from this subject matter of history.” But the state is always only the means for the preservation of many individuals: how could it be the aim? The hope is that with the preservation of so many blanks one may also protect a few in whom humanity culminates. Otherwise it makes no sense at all to preserve so many wretched human beings. The history of the state is the history of the egoism of the masses and of the blind desire to exist; this striving is justified to some extent only in the geniuses, inasmuch as they can thus exist. Individual and collective egoisms struggling against each other —an atomic whirl of egoisms—who would look for aims here?
    Through the genius something does result from this atomic whirl after all, and now one forms a milder opinion concerning the senselessness of this procedure —as if a blind hunter fired hundreds of times in vain and finally, by sheer accident, hit a bird. A result at last, he says to himself, and goes on firing.
    (vi, 336 f .)

    The damned folk soull When we speak of the German spirit we mean Luther, Goethe, Schiller, and a few others. It would be better even to speak of Lutherlike people, etc. We want to be careful about calling something German: in the first place, it is the language; but to understand this as an expression of the folk character is a mere phrase, and so far it has not been possible to do so with any people without fatal vagueness and figures of speech. Greek language and Greek “folk”! Let somebody bring them together! Moreover, it is the same as with writing: the most important basis of the language is not Greek but, as one now says, Indo-Germanic. It is somewhat better with style or the human being. To ascribe predicates to a people is always dangerous; in the